a greater share of retirees and a greater share of children and a smaller share of working age population, fewer numbers of people are in the labor force and provide income to support the services needed by the community. if the ratio shifts come you get less opportunity to generate services for the community than the quality of life in the community goes down at a party to attract labor force and you can see as part of the cycle we talked about. it gets harder and harder. ..grants come in? caller: it can be a shock. we had that in some of the outer serve to prevent communities whe there were rapid growth of the immigrant population. new idea ofng this what it meant to be a suburban community. it was a shift in the population from being 80% white to being

20% foreign-born. host: lisa sturtevant from george mason university. thanks for talking with us. marc perry with the u.s. census bureau wherererere

>> host: in the just released autobiography, "guardian angel," to the question i'm asked whether i'm on the left or right, the answer's either. i'm a daughter, a jew who believes in the repair of the world, and a journalist who believes speaking truth to power. why did you feel the need to write that about being on the right or left? >> guest: people pi on-hole nowadays, one or the other, and, you know, it's silly. life is complicated. people are neither right or left, but ordinary folk getting on with living their life in the best way they can and who see the world as it is, and what i have done for the last quarter century is, as a journalist, tell it as i see it to be which

means as a journalist, you know, i was train to look at the facts, look at the evidence, arrive at the conclusion, and tell people my conclusion, tell them a fact and conclusion. you know, quite a number of people today who say let's talk about the facts, and as a journalist, i know there's a lot of people out there who are in the kind of sensible center, as i like to say, who are completely plugged into reality who think what are the people telling me? i can't make sense of it, and so that's where i am. i'm kind of dealing with the world as it is, and people tend to put that into pigeon holes, are you left or right? i'm niter. i tell it as it is and connect with people who live life as it is. >> host: in the last two weeks, especially, you used the

term "follow the evidence," and the world turned upside down. >> that's right. indeed. sometimes the evidence takes us into places uncomfortable, telling us what's going on in which we don't like to know about because they frighten us. i believe we start with the evidence, and you don't pretend things are not as they are or don't try to make evidence or reality in what you hope it should be. start with what's there, and then you tell the friewt about it, and you reach a conclusion about it. that's what i try to do. >> host: where did you start on the political spectrum? >> guest: well, i started my professional life at the local journalist as i was kind of nowhere, but i came from a very modestly kind of background

where my whole family were people who were on the left side of the spectrum, a view of the world, the world was divided into the class and the little man, and we were the little man. that's how i was brought up. i had a fairly convention name student experience. this is the very early 1970s. you may not find this even to believe, but i had very long wild hair at the time, and i adopted a kind of attitude -- >> host: at oxford? >> guest: yes, and studied english literature and hung out with people like that. i never thought of myself as left wing, never. i thought of myself as what we called in britain, liberal, liberal of the road, sensible, tolerant, decent, best of the fellow human beings wanting to

have a better world, stand up for the vulnerable, and so on, and i'm still like that. i went to work for the guardian newspaper which is very -- it's the very heart of left wing media in britain, and i worked for guardian newspaper for 20 years, and what happened while i was working at the guardian was that, and possibly because i was working at the guardian, my political views did change. i still believed in standing up for the vulnerable in society in making a better world, trying to improve the lot of my fellow human beings, but when i came to realize when i was working there is people i assumed were on my side in the great end denver were actually on the other side, and they were not concerned with

bettering the better lot of the human beings, but bettering themselves and concerned only with their own mutation and their own sense of themselves as being noble, virtuous, wise, and great, and everyone else could run and jump. when they were on the other side and actually had, i thought, very illble views, intolerant views despite what they said and didn't actually care about the people, the bottom of the heap, the little people, that is when i realized, actually, we were on different sides, and 10, as i say, i still think that i believe in all the things i did believe in. what changed for me, and it was a dramatic seasick change, is i came to believe people on my side were not, and that the reasons why the world was as it was was rather different than what i originally thought it to

be. >> host: back to "guardian angels," just published today; correct? >> guest: that's correct, yes. >> host: i had not yet realized left aggression towards dissent or challenge is essentially defensive. they are either guilty about what they are doing because they know it is wrong, or else some level, at least, they know that their intellectual position is built on faith. >> guest: well, why i wrote that is one of the hallmarks of the political discourse on the left of politics, certainly in britain, and i'm not sure whether it's quite the same in the united states, is the extreme a great depression in -- aggression in which they conduct political discussion. they don't have an argument. they don't say, to me, your argument is wrong and this is why it's wrong and here's the following facts which show you are wrong. they don't have that discussion at all. they simply use abuse, and the

purpose of the abuse is to shut down the argument. it's to bully the person they disagree with, and more important than that is the tell other people this perp, don't go there, don't even listen to what she's saying. she's really dangerous. she's really horrible. she's really of no account at all. you can't actually have a discussion on the left, and so i thought of this quite a long time and seems to me the reason why people want to shut down the debate before it starts is because they are frightened of having it. if they were confident, then we would have dwsh we'd be having a civilized college yat argument. i say something, i disagree, could be heated, but we'd have an exchange of views. these people i'm talking about, they are too frightened even to have that, and over the years,

seems to be what they are frightened of the argument. in other words, they don't have the confidence of their own convictions or the confidence based to win an argument, and i find that very strange, and it means that i look at them quite differently as a result because i can see that they are -- it's all defensive. it's the shut down the argument in case they lose it, from which i conclude, their argument is built on sand. >> host: and melanie phil lips, in your 2010 book, "the world turned upside down: the global battle over god, truth, and power," you write, what have the issues of global warming, war in iraq, israel, and signtism got in common? not a lot you might think, but they all involve the promotion of the beliefs that purport to be unchallenged truths, but, in

fact, ideologies in which evidence is twisted and distorted to support and prove their governing idea. >> guest: yes. you see, i believe we're living in an era in which the idea of truth, objective truth, has been to a very large extent replaced by ideologies. there was a great movement of thought, many in our universities from which it originated years ago that we are in a post modern age, and what post modernism meant is there nos such thing as objective truth. if you do think, youssef mejri are stupid, not properly educated because not only clever, but everybody in a matter of opinion. you say this is of taste, and i say, no, it's not, that's your opinion. well, if there's no such thing as truth, there's no such things as lies, and consequently, it's an era where people are susceptible and suggestible to

lies and propaganda and no longer distinguish between truth and lies, and that has preoccupied me a great deal. now, because there's such a thing as truth, what's come in is kind of power. no such thing as truth, my opinion is the same as your opinion, everything is relative. what then happens is that i'm going to show that my view of the world is going to win over your view of the world. there becomes a contest of power groups, if you like. all the ideologies are power groupings. all these isms, sciencetism, the belief there's absolutely nothing in the world, universe that can't be explapped by actual empirical dmon demonstrateble facts and beyond ourselves, nothing beyond the material world.

utilitarianism, the belief that the only thing that matters is the happiness of the greatest number, and cons qenltly, there's no intrinesble value in human life. what matters is whether people are generally happy. there's a variety of isms which i think wrench evidence to fit to be more sort of today's environmentalism. environmentalism says we're all -- the going because of manmade global warming, and, you know, there's a bunch of evidence that says, actually, that's not necessarily true, but people who believe in these isms, like environmentalism, like sciencetism, they start with the conclusion. they don't start with the evidence that reach the conclusion, but they start with the conclusion and say the

evidence has to be wrenched to fit. the -- there are numerous examples of this actually happening to the extent that the exercise becomes literally fraudulent, intellectually fraudulent, where so-called reputeable academics told lies in order to reach the conclusion. this is a really terrible thing because it causes such confusion in our society. most people have no idea they are lied to, that what they are reading, what they are being told isn't actually following evidence where it leads, but starting with conclusions and selecting certain facts to build up the idea that this is actually true, but it's not true, and so it's, like, mind blowing, and to a certain extent, this is the kind of lonely furrow i've been plowing

in the media. i say "lonely," it's lonely in the media, but out there where ordinary people live lives that correspond to reality, you know what? they know. they have an instinct. they know when something suspect right. they know when they are being sold a pup, and i found if i write these things, i get engaged by people saying, thank goodness somebody in the public sphere is saying what i've always thought to be the case, and i thought i was going crazy, but now i find i'm not a crazy one after all. thank you for saying it. it's an extraordinary thing we live in a society where i think so many, millions of people sit there thinking, have i gone crazy or the world crazy? the answer is, i don't know, you is not gone crazy. it's my part of the world, the media, the public sphere, which is slightly lost track of reality here.

>> host: well, in your autobiography, "guardian angel," you detail your stint at the guardian and leaving it. how lonely did it get in the end and served as news editor there? >> guest: yes, i did. i was in charge of the news room of reporters for three years. it was uncomfortable when i was there because the guardian, certainly, when i was there, operates at the kind of family, everyone feels they belong to the organization and it's collegiate, and i have a lot of friends, and i'm afraid i, you know, and i started to say things or started to write things which could not tolerate because there's no devra davisuation from the line. you have to tow the line, and it may strike people as a little

strange it took me so long to kind of separate myself from all of this, but i was very attached to it, and it work out it was not just a few issues we had the problem with, but it was the whole way of looking at the world, and other human beings, and our place in the world, and it was a fundamental divergence between us, and so eventually, i, you know, i came to the conclusion that i simply couldn't carry on this so i left, and i did. it was not very comfortable, but i did have a lot of goods friends there, and i learned a lot. i mean, you know, the guardian is what made me -- is -- the guardian is what made me what i am today, really. they may not like to think that that is the part they played in my development, but they were, indeed, very important to me. >> host: where can your column be read now? >> guest: i write now a

regular opinion column for the daily mail, which was arguably britain's most influential newspaper, wide, most influential newspaper because it's almost uncandidly has an intuitive sense of that center ground and what that center ground is thinking, and it plugs into that and remits the voice -- represents the voice of what we call middle britain, and that's us. it represents very robustly a view of the world, which is grounded in reality and grounded in the real aspirations, hopes, and concerns of real people, and as a result, it's kind of, in a way, it's the yen and yang of the guardian. they are polar opposites, but both great warrior papers on either side of a division about

how we view the world. one considered to be on the left and the other the right. they have tremendous capacity for reflecting their values of the core constituencies so the guardian reflects the values of the intellectual intelligence, what we call the chattering classes, the political elites, the elites. the daily mail remits middle britain, reality, ordinary, striving, aspirational people. >> host: in "the world tumped upside down," the forward is my director and playwright david memmet writing the new religion taught is secular humanism, which, although it lacks precements, does contain innumerable sanctions and that byes.

of the latter, the most observed is loud and clear, do not tell the truth. >> guest: right. >> host: what does he mean by that? >> guest: well, what he means is what i, you know, have been sort of eluding to, and david has fought the same kind of fight that i've been involved in, although, he came to it more recently, and has himself been somewhat victimizedded by this, and what he -- well, what he's come to realize is that the fact is as i was saying that people, particularly on the left of the political divide, are gripped by a variety of ideologies, which mean that they state things as true, which are -- actually, refrequent the world as they would like it to be, but they are not truths. they don't believe there's such a thing as truth. that's what he is finding all the time himself over a variety

of issues, and it is changed the way, i think, he looks at the world. it's changed what's in the play. >> host: back to the book, you spent time in the book on israel, iraq, and islam. >> guest: uh-huh. >> host: and how you talk about islamism, the real reason they declaredded war on the west, embodied the individual and the authority, and in a globalized world, this freedom is a con they onthat threatens islam everywhere. >> guest: yes. well, this is, you know, an issue that preoccupied me several years and preoccupied us all more and more, and i do think, as i said, that there's a problem here with the islamic world, and with the religion at the root of that islamic world, and it's very, very important to

understand in all of this that when one talks about concerns, one is not talking about all the things, on the contrary. just to the appointment of view of britain, there's have many muslims, immigrants who have come precisely because they wanted to find out british, western values, live in freedom, prosper, wanted good jobs, but they wanted to live in freedom because freedom's very important to them. the womenmented to be treated as equals and wanted all things that we all want. freedom, peace, security, prosperity. , you know, they are not hung up on religious precepts causing us in the western world so much trouble. in the islamic world, those precepts are interpreted in a way that comes out of religion, and which is now dominant, and that is to say that the view of the world, which says that the world has to be relayed according to islamic priests,

that there is, you know, that muslims, where muslims are enjoying western-type freedom, that must be pulled back, made to conform to a very, very narrow authority -- authoritarian interpretation of islam, that view is now dominant, and the view that the west must be brought to heal for this vision, this interpretation of islam, is also dominant, and that's what i call islamism. people say, well, what is this word "islamism," what you mean is islam. i understand what they mean. islamism is a made up word, but i use it for a particular reason because it is an in order to allow for the fact there are muslims who are not extreme, who want to sign up to western value, and we must acknowledge that, and there are muslims who don't. those who doesn't i call and others call islamists because

they are trying to impose islamic dock train, islamic values on those who are not muslim and impose the most high bound, anti-freedom interpretation of the religion at the most narrow on muslim. they are islamists. they are a threat to us. they say what their intention is, create the old islamic fate, the muslim empire to go beyond that and to conquer britain, america, and explicit, and to impose sley -- sleer ya. those are islamist, violence, equipped with war and terrorism, and some are not, but believe they can confer the west to a kind of cultural creep, if you

like, a kind of cultural takeover and should be extremely worried by them. they are all islamists. some are violent, some are not. on the other hand, there's a lot of muslims who are not islamists, and we must keep both in our minds. there's a difference between those who threaten us and those who describe to us lame who are muslims themselves threatened by the islamist, and we must keep those two things, i think, in our minds at the same time, and that's what i tried to do when i wrote the book about what i perceive to be the case in the way in which to my great horror fear the british ruling class will give in to islamism, to the attempt to take over, to the attempt to undermind britain and

encroachment of the values in britain, and the class was saying let's go along with this. that's why i wrote, but in the book, i was extremely careful about, i think we must be to acknowledge them, there are many, many muslims who find this equally frightening and worrying and have nothing to do with it. >> host: were you branded a racest after the book came out? grg i don't think i was branded a racist, because, of course, that is a particularly ignorant thing to say because islam is not a race, but a religion. i find it hard to see, you know, if onements to append a negative end tat, it's not the word it use, but people found ways to be rude. there's no shortage of the creative imagination coming to the dispensing of insults in this territory, i'm afraid.

>> host: in the book, you talk about multiculturism quite a bit. did it affect your view on british society and british politicians? >> guest: multiculturism is one of the most misunderstood and one of the most pernicious that affects us today. one of the most misunderstood because people assume larger culturallism must be a thing because it's about being tolerant and nice to people of other cultures, suspect it? well, no. if that's all it was, then i would be the first to support it because that's what we should be in any kind of toller rand democratic free society, be respectful of differences and toller rapt of other people's religions and cultures. that's not what multiculturism is. that says that all cultures are equal; therefore, no culture cannot hold its values as preferable to any other. now, what that means for the

west is that we in the west cannot, if we are multiculture, truly multiculturallists, we in the west can want uphold our values of freedom, tolerance, equality for women and so op over those cultures which don't uphold freedom, tolerance, equality for women, and all the rest of it. that's what multiculturism means, and britain went down the road saying we can't talk about female genital mutilation because that's their culture. we had cases in britain in which there was one case in particular where a black child was abused over many, many years and finally died in the most appalling circumstances at the hands of her mother and her mother's lover, and the social

workers could not bring themselves to intervene to stop the child's torture and murder because they said this is their culture. now, to me, that is racest. that is racist to say a black child is not entitled to the same expectations of life, liberty as the rest of us because that's the culture? there's a obscene to me, obscene. it's an inverse race. i. that's what multiculturism did. we as white liberals can't stand up and say it's wrong to torture a child, wrong to neglect a child, wrong to cause a child's death if he's black because that's their culture. that's what multiculturalism does, and that's the obscenity, and it lends itself a kind of paralysis so when you get is lawn mowerrist violence, when you get, you know, a fort hood, when you get a boston massacre,

when you get the recruitment of young men, young muslim men born in britain, the recruitment of young men to islamic radicalism, multiculture society stands back and says we can't say anything about this because it would be racist, islam imphobic and this, to me, is suicide note to itself. it's western society saying we can want uphold freedom, peace, liberty, equality, decency. are we really saying that? of course not, of course not we have this terrible model, and it seems to be like so many of the other difficulties we're in. you know, so so much has to do h what i consider to be, and i wrote this somewhere, rather, the language, you know, we -- across terrible divisions of

left and right, you know, most of us, hopefully, believe in things like freedom, being tolerant and respectful of others. this is not rolled into one political perspective or another. we all basically think the same thing, but the language is hijacked so notions such as, you know, justice and tolerance and compassion, these words have been kind of twisted through an ideological frame work and prism meaning the opposite, and one can't use them without terrible con niewtion, so i would like to see us reclaim the language from the hijackers so we can all speak to each other in terms we all understand that actually reflect what we are all trying to convey. >> you're watching booktv on

c-span2 #, specific lip the monthly "in-depth" program, an author talks about his or her book, the first sunday of the month, and it's a live call-in program. we want to hear from you as well. she's a columnist with the daily mail and author of nine books. beginning with the divided house, women at west minister out in 1980, medical ethics and contemporary science in 1985. all must have prizes, 1998. the sex change society, the neuters male came out the next year. america's social revolution came out in 2001. the assent of women, the suffrage movement, and then we talk about how britain created a terror state within, came out in 2006. the world turned upside down, global battle over god, truth, and power in 2011, and, finally,

just today guardian angel came out, her autobiography. if you want to participate in the conversation call in, and those of you in the east and central time zones, and if you live in the mountain and pacific time zone, go ahead and dial in, and if you can't get through, we have social media. you can go to the facebook page, facebook.com/booktv, there at the top, make a comment or question for her and send in a tweet @booktv is the twitter handle, and e-mail, booktv@c-span.org. guardian angel, who published it? talk about that a bit. >> guest: oh, this is frightening for me because i published it. that is to say it is one of five titles published this weekend because i turned myself into a publisher of electronic books,

and this is going to be a platform, not just for me, but for authors who think broadly like me, to say they connect with reality too. publishing books in electronic format, and the reason for this is, you know, publishing is changing, and so many more people now have e-readers, download book on kindle, the ipad, and the capacity therefore to reach so many more people is enormous, so i have formed my own imprint, and there's five books published this weekend to which my memoir, guardian angel, you refer to is but one, and i hope that they will bring my view of the world shared by so many to a large audience who want to find out more with the aim to expand public debate.

my aim is to put into the public domain a load of information or opinions which is not easily found because it's not generally published or to correct, to provide another way of looking at things that i think information is out there, but it needs to be corrected. also, something, which i've never. able to do is so exciting to me as a journalist, and i spent my career by a commentator, telling people, you know, this is how the world is, but basically, you don't like it? well, tough. nothing i can do about it. i'm just telling you how it is. you got to get on with it. people have said to me over the years, they said, so glad you're writing what you're writing, but, you know, i feel so powerless, classically, they say, well, you know, i got teenage kids, and my goodness, me, everything you write about, the impact of social media, you know, the capacity to be bullied on facebook or be turnedded into

a bully on facebook, and then, you know, drugs out there, and, you know, sex, drugs, and rock n' roll, and what can i do is a parent? i feel helpless. i say, as a journalist, i can't help you, but i can tell you what the situation. i feel sorry you are like this, i'm also a parent, but there's nothing i can do, but now i have this new digital platform and book to put in the public domain to help people. for example, one of the books i publish today is a book by a mistress who was public, an independent school, over the years, a year or so ago, runs or the head mistress of an expensive school, and people pay a lot of money to have their girl educated at that school and benefit from the wisdom. her wisdom about what you do

with teenage girls and how to approach them. well, now, i bottled that and put it in the book. >> host: the 21st century daughter? >> how to decode your 21st century daughter, a guide for anxious parent of teenage girls. how wonderful i'm able to do that suddenly, and i never thought of journalist i'd be able to do that. one of my many aims of the inferns is to, where possible, to say to people, you don't have be quite so hopeless. it's not i and like people like me tell you how the world is, but we are also telling you how good things happen in the world and telling you here's how you can have a bit of a handle on the things that do worry and you perplex you and make life a bit better. >> host: m-books, embooks.com;

is that correct? where does the em come from. >> host: it's m, but em is how you sound out my the first letter of my name, "m," and then my company is melanie phillips electric media, and on the website, there's nowhere to download em books, which you can buy on amazon, but download from the website, but you can also, on my website, get a lot more of me, a lot more of em, because there's video stuff. there's video interviews, video presentations by me about the books, about the company, and in a few days time, i'll put out a video conversation i had which i found really, really fascinating, it was with a

playwright called richard bean. people in america may know richard from the smash hit broadway comedy that came over here, not that long ago called "one man, two governors," a smash hit in london and then came to broadway. the interesting thing is richard bean is a man of the left, but he has written plays in the past which have tackledded topics on global warming, immigration, and in a very open minded, clear-eyed way, and he, himself, became the target of terrible vilification, and we had an interesting conversation which i'll put up on the website soon in which we discussed this phenomena that it's so difficult now to have a civilized conversation as he and i are having between people who don't necessarily agree on every thing at all, but we can both agree on a number of things. we can have a civilized

discussion, and how difficult it is now in the polarized political environment for it to happen, the extent to which abuse replaced discussion and civilized arguments, and what i terrible thing that is because it's like a closing of the mind that is going on in the west. that's what i find so frightening is the kind of repudiation of reason. it's the kind -- we're supposed to be living in the most rational age, society, the most rational age in the west known to man, and yet, issue by issue, the mind is closing, and both richard and i think that's frightening, and it's one of the things that i have in my mind with em books i'm going to try to open it up more, open up public debate, and hopefully create, help create with the aid of the people who are going to be reading and watching, help create a civilized space where we can all come together, and,

okay, we can disagree, but we can do so in a sighfullized way expanding public education, consciousness, and brings us together instead of driving us apart. >> host: one more issue before we go to calls and tweets and e-mails, ect.. 1998, all must have prizes came out. >> guest: oh, yeah. >> host: child centered education entails the destruction of childhood. >> guest: absolutely. absolutely. >> host: what's that mean? >> guest: well, it sounds paradoxical, but it's straightforward. child centered education, which i say originated, really, originated with john jack who was a thinker of the enlightenment, but charles said education, which drew on his theories, actually was origin nateed in this country with an educationist calledded john dewey who was fantastically inflew enrnl, not just over education in america, but came

over the upon to britain as well, and what the education was, what the whole philosophy was was that what a child brings to the classroom experience is more important anything the adult world can give to the child. the child is like a plant. you have to water it gently and then the plant grows. anything the adult world gives to the child is a constriction on that growth so when the child comes to the classroom, the child removes the ability to learn by himself, and what the adult world and teacher has to do is take a backseat and water it, but not feed it, not give the child information or knowledge because that can strain the child crippling him forever. that is what is child

cementerred education which not only ruined, i think, american education, but from my perspective, and the child is, use a job, but it's important, the child is an autonomous meaning maker. now, what does that mean? it means that the child makes sense for himself or herself of the world around. it's as if you say, you know what? going to the jungle, i'm not giving you a mapment find your own way. that's what we have done to chirp in the class room, and what a teacher should be doing, which is guiding the child into the world, giving the child the mental map by which the child is cake sense of the world, the teacher is taking a backseat. the teacher's basically saying

to the child, you're now an adult. adults make their own way. we don't have to teach adults. we don't have to guide them by the hand. they are not pupils. you're now an adult. you're an adult. the idea that a child needs to be guided is destroyeded. i think more than that, beyond teaching, as i said it, i tried to extrain it, i almost tried it, this does not come from nowhere, but it's part and parcel of an adult world that says we're all now responsible for ourselves making it up as we go along, and not only are we not going to give child the map to guide him or her throughout the world in terms of knowledge, education, and the transmission of knowledge, in that sense, but we're not going to give moral maps either. wore not going to say to the

child, bad idea to do drugs, illegal, don't do it. bad idea to have sex before you're 18, before you're married, bad idea. we're going to say to the child aged 14, aged 12, aged 10, and in britain now, age 7 or 8, here's the information about drugs. here's the information about sex. here are all the positions in sex you can use. here are all the drugs you might come across. here's the information about them. here are the risks. you decide now. any, that to me is not teaching a child as a child, but treating them like a premature adult, and in my view, if the adult world treats children not adds children, but premature adults, that's an abandonment of

children, abandonment of the idea of what being an adult in relation to the child is. it's the abandonment of teaching. the abandonment of proper parenting which is about being responsible for that child, for that child's welfare and guiding the child in the world until they can make the decisions about sex and drugs and to know what's going on in the world or make sense of it by him or herself. isn't that what being a parent or teacher is about? in britain and america, so a greater or lesser extent, the adult world left that responsibility, and now we have several generations gone past, generations of children who have been abandoned, and result of that is they have grope up into adults who don't know how to be adults. they don't know how to parent their own children properly because they were not parented properly, and teachers like in

britain, we have the problem to a large extent. you have teachers who don't know what it is they don't know so they can't teach mathematic. they don't teach english, grammar. they've never been taught it. they don't know what they don't know, and so we have this kind of terrible cycle of poor education and poor parenting creating a problem down the generations. this is very fright ping because it comes to the point eventually where people forget completely, a society forgets completely what it is they should be passing on. that's why we have prizes because i work up to it in the guardian, i could see what was going on in education. i had young children. i couldn't find a school for my very yowchg children that was not consistenting of, you know,

let them run rotten. i had app old-fashioned rule they needed to be taught something. i couldn't find schools to do it so i started to look, went where the evidence led, and looked at what the teachers were teaching and why they were teaching in that way, what they were taught in teacher training institutions, and i came across this madness. the autonomous meaning maker, teaching a child not to read. you couldn't believe the madness. the new literacy, the new literacy, which was to abolish literal sigh on the basis that, and i kid you not, i read this in tract after tract in teaching institutions, this is what training teachers are taught, societies are not equal. the working class is oppressed. people are taught to read,

therefore, that fact that they can read is part of the oppression so in order that they could no longer be oppressed with teaching them to read. it sounds absolutely barking mad. it was barking mad, but that was the kind of ideology that helped lead generations of teachers to stop teaching children to read and to say they will teach themselves to read. we'll just literally give them the book, and then they will teach themselves to read. they will look at the print on the page. we'll read the story. they'll memorize the words, or they'll guess the words, and then we can tell them they are reading. you had generations of children who grew up to be ill literal, but they were told that they were literate. this is wicked stuff.

when i came across all of this, when i was at the guardian, i couldn't believe it. i couldn't believe a society could take this. you know, you look at this, you think this is beyond belief. it was true. you know, i did a lot of research, and it took me into, you know, beyond the teaching of reading, took me into all kinds of avenues which were equally bizarre, and so i wrote the book, and i wrote one voice the entire education establishment rose up and denounced the book this is kind of, what i was sighing in the book, that this thing had taken over the entire education establishment, and low and behold, they proved it by writing up and denouncing the book, but i got written to and

contacted by endless numbers of of parents who said, oh, now i understand, now i understand what i couldn't understand about my child's education, and i got written to by teachers and education psychologists who said to me what you said is not any true, and furthermore, i can't say it as a teacher or educational psychologist because i will lose my job, and that's when i realized beyond the issues there was something worse happening, the kind of shutting down of thought itself. >> host: very quickly, your website if people want to see your published books today or go to your personal website. >> guest: go to embooks.com. e-m, and there you can find the memoir and other books published, yeah. >> host: melani ephillips.com?

>> guest: that's the personal website where the blog is housed and where they get the journalism i wrote so far is archived on melaniephil lips.com. >> host: tim in milwaukee, wisconsin, thank you for holding. you're on. >> caller: thank you. i'm a big fan of yours and say for this reason. you hit it on the head when you say that we are so prone to lying, either one part of the other, that it shuts down discussion and debatings, and what i find, i call myself an eisenhower democrat with people on both sides of the aisle think i'm a nut case, but i have talked about issues with conservatives and liberals, and i find out the more we have a discussion, the more we listen to each other, and find we're not that far apart.

>> guest: yes. >> host: which is just amazing. >> guest: yes. >> caller: i want to give you a quick scenario. we had a superinten didn't, and education is big for me because i tutor young intercity kids. there was a scenario in the 1990s where the big public school system in milwaukee which i feel does not work anymore, okay, well, we had a superintendent that wanted to break up the school system, make it into smaller school systems, and they were pushed aside by both sides of the aisle. pushed aside. he was run out of town. one quick question for you. i agree with you, and i read your books, and i love your thoughts on opening people to open themselves to each other, but on religion, i want to ask a quick question, and you can go. do you think that -- you say we turned o ideology here in this country. do you feel that if we -- if we go back to sort of a religious

sort of country in that people go to church more or, you know, have more faith, do you think -- are we -- are we -- are we going to limit that debate again? >> host: all right. we got the point. thank you for calling in. >> guest: well, i think that religion is at the heart of this and it is a problem because people have a lot of people increasingly have a problem in belief, and i'm not sure we have an answer to this particular part of the issue, but i do think that the march of ideology is very, very associated with the march of secularism, and the emotion of organized formalized religion specifically, christianity, the jewish precepts that underlie christianty, the christian faith that is at the bedrock, the bedrock faith of the west, and

this is particularly true, more true in britain than america, by in comparison to britain, america is really a rather religious country, still has great center ground in america is still pretty faithful whereas in britain, it's really lost its faith, and i believe that these great values that we all prized so much such as a belief in the elite dignity and integrity of every human being, i mean, this, you know, this is the thing that animates our western belief in democracy, freedom, and the rest of it to the very center, of course, a biblical precept. you know, it is -- we respect each other because we believe fundment tally we are all made in the image of god, and i can take god out of the equation

completely, and there's no equality. simple adds that. i think it's a big problem. i think that i have a problem, myself, with some of the, treem parts of all religions, but i believe we can't think the way out of the box and get ourselves out of the predictment unless there's biblical precepts. >> host: arnold posts on facebook, in the u.s., all the characteristics you ascribe to the west in terms of cutting off the argument with the tax, manipulating the facts to support a predetermined opinion and cherry picking data could be attributed to the right speaking of rush limbaugh. >> guest: i'm not familiar with the individuals to a large extent, but i do think that, you

know, there are people on all sides of the political spectrum who distort, exage ire rate, play fast and lose with the fact. all of us are prone to -- whatever side of the divide we're on, there's people op all sides prone to this behavior, and the point i made was dirvelt from that, that people on the left do start from a position, as i said before, where there's a conclusion. they have a conclusion to which they wish the fact to fit. now, i don't think that is a position that's held by people not on the left and i hesitate to say the right because people are not on the left who are not

on the right either, and i don't think it's the kind of institutionalized characteristic of people not on the left, to, as it were, almost by default start from a prerange of preordained conclusions because that's why they are not on the left. they don't have a cop collusion. they didn't start with an ideology. there is no. the anotherrology is the left. the left is subscribedded to a particular set of ideas which drive all all before it. people who are not on the left have all kinds of ideas. they hold ideas strongly, but nevertheless, it's not a characteristic of all people who are not on the left to sort through the prism. i know there are certain individuals who take extreme

positions who are not on the left. those people may well wrench evidence to fit. i don't know. i have not looked in detail in what they do, but i know the people who control the culture, our universities, the mainstream media, and in britain, the political class, including the conservative party. ..

>> people are very shocked when they hear me criticize mrs. thatcher because the person who is on the left like i should be behind her banner but it is complicated but i have a great deal of respect for the late margaret thatcher she was a political titan the likes of which we probably will not see again which is to our disadvantage because she

shared a course of leadership but what she did for britain was invaluable at the time and she said the story that we have told ourselves, we simply have to manage declined and subside gently between the waves. that is over. give britain a sense of its own value. that is what leadership is. you find the best in your country and you make the most of its. i have a great deal of respect for her and i thought it was truly dreadful when she died. there were so many who gloated they literally gloated over her dead body and it was disgusting. she was a political titan however i did have at the

time and i still have considerable reservations about what she did. she took on the trade union in britain they were not allowing the government to govern so that was entirely correct and tried to give britain a sense of its own destiny in the world. great. but she did have a narrow perspective and saw everything in terms of economics and bought everything could be solved to run everything like the corner shop. there is a great place for that and she is instituted reforms and changes on those principles which were blasting it with the underlying value to britain but the problem was she did not register something else bad they was going wrong which could not be corrected by market forces. it had to do with the things

or the way we related to each other on the bond of trust, a fellowship of the common culture under the attack from these forces forces, led the rise of group rights going group against group, led the madness taking over the teaching profession but she'd never began to grasp and then only partially. she thought everything was the free market. as a result she took institutions which rely on intangibles like trust and a shared sense of the heritage value and basically dismiss them far too lightly indeed

she thought anything that was inherited was a conspiracy against the consumer everything would be distrusted so professionalism based on the body of people who share the same kind of the unspoken assumptions about the way they operate -- operated to her was a recipe of defrauding the consumer. so do destroy the bond of trust with the belief in the other person's honesty lowe's better rooted in tradition a true radical and i thought did quite a lot of

damage i think there was a terrible symmetry of left and right that the left basically said in the family education with all the bonds that blinker have been thrown up in the air and what we say mattered if i decide living with my three lovers is right for me then it is right and no one else has the authority to tell me otherwise. so the radical privatization of morality, the individual grains supreme. to determine what is right for me and you have no right

to tell me i am not so from the left it was radical individualism from the social sphere that i thought was destroying family, the traditional family family, education, morality in general but on the right from the economic sphere thatcherism basically said we don't hold within the traditions or the adn the civil service with the traditional understanding the individual consumer is the only thing that will keep us up so they should all be open to the consumer

that was individualism in the economic sphere and the two forces working together hyper individualism in a society that i thought and still think was driven apart, fragmented by individualism that is what we needed to get away from but to fight for the bonds that keep us together shared tradition tradition, language, religio n, history. that combine assassination and society and height and individualism on left and right was fragmenting us and after all that has happened in the journey i have been on, i still think that is not wrong. >> host: san antonio, texas you are on booktv with c-span2 with melanie phillips. >> caller: thank you for taking my call i must admit i have never heard of you

before. i a agree with most of what you are saying that i want to challenge something. you talk about people of the pejorative truce to make an argument to put the conclusion first but i thank you may have done the same thing to talk about multiculturalism that means all cultures are equal but i don't know what text says that some basic question is rather than i don't know if there are universal truth but i do know people have the right to understand that community to hold up to universal scrutiny what we call universal truth than that is worthy of consideration what people do

as you have done to talk about multiculturalism they talk about something silly and it has its problems also also beating up on the black child and that the social worker is multiculturalism. i would like you to reconsider also what is the definition. >> host: thank you very much. >> guest: i think we are on the same page. the question of language more than anything else but there have been taxed but it is not that i ever base my view on a text i base my view of what multiculturalism and what it was the way saw operating. but they cannot say any culture is better than any other and i have heard this

over the last quarter century over and over and over again. i have heard it to me, it to others, in the context of a whole range of the events that have happened and it seems to me there for from the evidence that i have seen, that is the conclusion i have come to. and i quite agree different people have different understandings of what will biculturalism is in that is the whole conversation we can talk about it in the way that i understand it to be the case and other people talk about it to be something quite different. whenever i have this conversation i always try to put out there what my definition is so we know what we're talking about.

this is a great point* that yes, of course, in my view of properly tolerant society accepts different people believe different things and you have a respect for that but nevertheless in my view if you want to uphold a liberal democratic society that is described certain values such as tolerance of other people's belief the ability of people to have no religion without persecution , equality for women we could have the core values if you want to uphold those who cannot be multi-cultural and you have to say actually it is preferable to another and therefore quite frankly we have put it on the same page

and that this conversation is the way the terms are used so differently. >> host: the next call comes from california. hello patricia. >> caller: i very much enjoy your conversation i would like to start reading your books as soon as possible by working in a large urban school district and i want to ask acquistion i thought about this problem of lot. i am not in the of it when literary sphere but i did feel in the practical day-to-day operation dealing with said difficulties of a large school district a lot

to have come to this system with the newer methods they are really at a loss because it is hard to impose any point* of view of the legal system. i know in britain it is probably very different but i remember when i was teaching we had an english teacher she was a grammarian but she was told it was racist to teach grammar. things that you're talking about. one of the things the adults experience is a few do buck the system and go against the grain you face a serious legal challenging if that is a problem in britain? my other question is a

contemporary british writers? i will be making a trip to britain very soon. >> guest: we have a different legal system from yours i am not sure it is quite the same there are legal challenges in the past which was published in the '90s in the '80s. >> host: 1988. >> guest: i am sorry. i put into that. -- books some experiences

that some teachers in which they were terrorized from the education board they education officials from the local authority that has the legal authority over the school. i recalled one teacher right thing to me saying she taught a conventional way a structured class of facing the front with a structured reading scheme and her pupils did very, very well but wind of local education would come around she hid all the books and rearrange the chairs into chaos and injected chaos into the classroom to get through the inspection. that is what is going on. i don't think that is the case now but there's that conformism which means if

you don't teach in the approved way that you talk about, then you don't get on, promoted it is that sort of thing is that sort of legal challenge. i am not sure if you're talking about authors of education. >> host: who are you reading right now? maybe we will start there. >> guest: in terms of factual books? >> host: whenever you want to say. what would you recommend recommended british author. >> a very much depends what you are looking for. i tend to read stuff about foreign policy which perhaps is not for everyone's taste.

>> host: we will be showing some of your favorite books that influence you and maybe you can take a look at that list and go from there, for that caller. finally a woman after my own heart and mind too bad her web site only shows won eight of the content. >> guest: which website? >> host: i am not sure. maybe melanie phillips.com and the block again the columns are there. >> guest: on my personal web site some of the archives has been subjected to a terrible technical glitches and there is difficulty in accessing it which i do apologize. >> host: but all of your recent daily mail columns are there. >> guest: people can access the recent columns without a problem.

that is probably what this person is referring to that if you go back into the archive several years back then there is a problem to access some of the archive material. >> host: how much of the electronic book will be published? the first chapter? >> guest: there is bits of the book, but there will be different templates for different folks. i don't want to give away the excitement that is about to be put out over the next few days but if they look at the website they will see shall we say the creative use of digital which will deelites and excite people in a way that doctors don't usually do with their published books. the main thing is you

download the book but there is a certain amount of video material already there and there will be more let's just say, a new way of giving people a taste of the books that are available. >> host: your autobiography guardian angel published today. margaux from california thank you for holding. >> caller: thank you. i have two questions. first of all, have you written anything about the extreme christian right in america that really is a radical islamist and for example, the promise makers at the note you have written anything about that of above to read what you have to say and my second question is you have any idea how to restore rational discourse?

thank you very much. >> guest: rational discourse is a humbling of a question that i devote quite a bit of my time. all i can do is try to engender it to bring on people who are also riding in a similar kind of fame and this discussion and conversation to get the debate going what you are asking is you have to shift the culture and it has gone wrong in all these ways. howdy you shifted back again away from the idea of these objective truths? it is all one person could

do and all those that are like-minded to somehow make our voices heard it is a strange chemistry that i think happens speaking into a wilderness all these things and nothing changes and everything is helpless then suddenly out of the blue it is like a kaleidoscope being shaken and then it changes now suddenly people say something different and rethink where did that come from? the answer is society works from a different set of levels at the same time that it is subterranean levels that on the surface it could be about conversation, an angry conversation that they don't listen to each other

at all. but it is actually seeping down underneath and people are listening and processing, thinking, and they start shifting fairview and after a period of time it suddenly pops up. all we can do is keep saying things to try to produce the more enlightened and rational discourse to hope eventually this becomes with the mechanism and to write about the extreme christian right i am afraid i have not looked at them i am aware there is a policy of such individuals but in my journalism of i basically my journalistic career i have been involved of domestic issues and not the cultural developments not across the

pond in the american christian extreme right as you call them is something that is particular to america i don't yet have my head around it but i'm sure it is in store. >> host: houston texas. good afternoon. >> caller: good afternoon. i'm an educator here in texas i teach high-school science as well as special education and i have a comment and question. for the guy who came up with a concept that developed into black history month, he wrote a book called the miss education of the negro and speaks about how the church of organized religion is actually helping to

miseducate the negro in america. but my question to you is how do you think talk about generational ignorance where they just teach what they know? had you think that african diaspora is affecting education? >> guest: i did not hear the question. >> caller: like a slave atlantic slave trade during slavery as a descendant of slaves have reducing that affects education? >> guest: i can only speak from the british perspective which really on this particular matter is very different from the american perspective and the african diaspora has not had much of an effect at all.

the kind of changes i have been talking about the developments of education for the worse came about almost exclusively as a result of white so-called liberals in britain. as a young reporter of the guardian, i recall and it is in one of my books, i remember in countering this, i remembered going to an area in north london that as a significant black population. maidenly african caribbean population and told in the '80s by a representative of this particular community that how horrified they were that's the labor or left-wing education authority that control the schools in their area were preventing them as black parents from stepping up as

an independent school of local authority and state-funded control, a setting of the independent school to teach their children, the black children the rudiments of proper education, a proper literacy , and to teach them about the world as it was. because their children were treated as white liberals as if they were not entitled to the best education and were prevented from setting up the school i thank you call them the education board is the equivalent on the basis there was no need and the education board knew what was best for the black children. that is the experience i am coming from in britain but the role played by black people in britain is very

different from the history of black people in america and in britain, we don't have a history of slavery that you had. >> host: another call from houston texas. >> caller: ms. phillips i had never heard of you nor have i ever heard you speak, but listening to you this morning, i am optimistic that there are people in the world like yourself, who are speaking about moderation or talking about prudence. as a member of the quote-unquote silent majority, i feel incredibly repressive by the left and right with the rhetoric and the things that are thrown out to me or to the people that i love.

they have to try to sort it out and disseminate it. do you have suggestions on a social level what is the suggestion for family gatherings, something as simple as having a dinner party to invite people over to set the ground rules for discourse and discussion without throwing things at each other and acting in a non prudent manner. any suggestions? it seems to me before the technology agent took over people used to sit down and have civil discourse and it seems there is none of that. >> host: did you for calling. >> guest: there are family gatherings where members of the same family come to blows. but you touch on another point* that i think is rather regrettable. i suspect it is here but we are becoming that in britain

the dining table is going out of fashion. that all by than any more because they don't sit around the table anymore. they grazing and sit in front of the tv or their computer screens or they are plugged into their phone and they graze from the refrigerator and meals are a fantastic vehicle for socialization, and social discourse. and gathering around the table is a premier way in which families talk to each other and friends and colleagues and everybody can talk to each other around the meal. it is a sociable revenge.

-- even end. but in a society where we do our own thing to the extent that we are is a very difficult challenge but it would be very nice if parents could make a feature of this insist once a week or once a day to gather around a table, i think rituals are terribly important. religious rituals, the thanksgiving dinner, the christmas dinner, i am jewish and the friday night meal, this one negative these are the basis that family and friends literally get together and put aside their technical -- technology and get the heads up and looked it each other and talk to each other and

that is for similar discourse in that is for the better. >> host: one of the votes we have not had a chance is the sex change society. you write to that then mailed red rating is not arbitrary but it is important to cement masculine identity and to civilize aggressive male characteristics. >> guest: how unfashionable is that? did i really right back? [laughter] i think i was right to. it is unfashionable i wrote that book but basically we are a unisex society women go out to work and real men are unchanged i have been a working mother of the last

person to say women should now work also but the ladies think there is a need to recognize that for women that work, no matter how important it was vital for me i cannot imagine me now working ever. nevertheless, amanda stand work plays different roles than men. for than it is essential, i think to their identity for women it is often very important paid work it was not important to me but for millions of women but we don't feel less of a woman if we don't but men do it is a very unfashionable idea but i believe it to be true

and consequently unemployment for a man is absolutely devastating wear for a woman, a painful, and knowing, the state she does not want to be in but does not have the same effect. there is the other point* to brad winning that the russian of the breadwinner function is very much chicken and the a basically in my view what has driven families apart so the traditional family life of but one of the key factors that by and large women have

changed the calibration of where their best interests lie. in the past they thought of themselves they may have wanted to work but in order to have children they need to have the father on board to support them while the children are growing up and therefore they looked for a mate and married him but then came a bunch of social changes the they could do would on their own if they wanted to be mother and father and have a child without the father on board at all, visit the local sperm bank in do that rather completely if they were married to the father or live with the father because

ultimately they can go alone and they were marginalized and pushed out to ann basically a waste of space and on they needed to provided this firm in the first place then watching the sperm donors that was with their usefulness. and they became demoralized if they wouldn't have one woman making themselves unique then why stop? because there was not a commitment to bring up a child. to have the whole business of working was less vital and it is checking in and day if the man has a child

to support, he will work longer hours and if he doesn't, it is less of a push. it is much more complicated than there are many other factors by which it pate that i would reduce it to this but i do think it is an important change that happened, a change for the worse we throw the baby out with the bath water to mix a metaphor. because women should be able to work and men should be able to feel the obligation to take an active role in the nurturing of their children to help in the home. but we lost a sense of the differences it is not stupid or ignorant to say that but it is true and to acknowledgement those differences are it is to

accommodate reality once again we tried to refashion reality to accommodate an idea of what we think should be the case in that as a great deal of distress. >> host: your watching booktv on c-span2 our guest is author and columnist melanie phillips we have a little over one hour left in our program here is a look at ms. phillips influences and favorite books.

>> host: if you cannot get through on the phone line to a taco with -- to talk with melanie phillips you can contact her through social media. we have our facebook page that you can make a comment there and what a tweet on

twitter and finally e-mail. melanie phillips is the author of nine books the most recent has just come out today called guardian angel. she began writing in 1980, "the divided house" comment "doctors' dilemmas" 1985. "all must have prizes" 1998. sex change society, 1999. america's social revolution 2001. the world turned upside down the global battle. 2011. the ascent of woman. if you would like two-seat melanie phillips talk about that book in depth at we covered and the event with

her when that book came out and finally today guardian angel comes out edits and e-book so who are alfred and mabel? >> guest: they were my parents. i love them very much. they were the formative influences in my life especially my mother to my was extremely close and they were very typical of british jews of that generation around some second world war and married just after in 1947. they came from families which originally came from as immigrants to britain from poland and russia around the 20th century the typical pattern of immigration of the jews into

britain around that time. they were typical of the british jewish community. my father's old dresses from the van and made them and my mother had a children's clothes shop and a jewish family, religiously we were not very religiously observant. my parents went to the of synagogue high holy days but we observed and i was always expected to be at home for the meal on friday evening and it is instilled in me jewish values with self discipline and looking after other people in the household made me what i am

today and that i was in on the child and that i had a particularly close relationship to my mother in particular and a great influence on me. >> host: reading guardian angel was that the tough book to write? you have a little bit i know what word you use about your childhood. >> guest: it was a very tough but generally i always thought journalists to write about themselves are that it you keep yourself out of the story and brings the world to other people and don't bring yourself. i never before would have written about myself that way that i have been a guardian angel but i wanted to write a book which explains what people find so perplexing of this great journey i have been on from half of the left-wing establishment in britain to become what people think is

being on the right to i think a champion of the center ground but through the prism of the personal journey i think that's what happens to britain with the english speaking world and then having sketches out i thought i actually cannot do this without going one step further to explain why i was as i was and how i reacted to what i came across in the only way one can do that is to explain how i am as i am, is to go see my family background. i found myself for the first time ever going to imprint a

story that is extremely painful to me that involves a separation from the individual that i loved very much but i was far too close, a mother in particular. i ended up writing a book about to separations, one from my real family that was extraordinarily painful and the separation from my political family which is also extremely painful at the point* the two fed into each other that they ran in parallel it was a painful thing to right because i was writing about myself and those who were dearest to me and i found it very uncomfortable but there

wasn't another way to do it. >> host: in melanie phillips is our guest. if you cannot get through, i wonder our international viewers to know if you would like to participate particularly those in great britain. we have a dedicated line for international callers only. new york thank you for holding. please go ahead. >> caller: can you hear me? great. the problem i am having with your presentation is i don't know the reality is there but in the united states we really don't have a left. that was destroyed during the mccarthy period we do have the labor party but not socialism and marxism has been demonized so in our

society you cannot talk to them because they could be completely irrational and calling names but they come from the right. the left has no power we have one senator in vermont, bernie sanders who calls himself an independent but maybe he is really a socialist. but if you were writing the book with the experience of the united states you might have a different take of the people you cannot talk to. in our country it is the people that are called the tea party people and the political spectrum in the united states has moved completely to the right. we have a center which is what the democrats are then the extreme right which is what the republicans have become and as a consequence of the pressure of the two-party. >> host: where do you consider yourself? [laughter] >> caller: i am one of

those that would consider myself, labels are a problem. i degree we should all respect one another and listen to one another but the consequence of the economic situation and the foreign policy situation i am a critic of u.s. foreign policy and that all have to be on the left because thomas johnson was a conservative economist was very critical of u.s. foreign policy in his book blow back. >> host: we have a lot on the table let's hear what melanie phillips has to say. >> guest: you are right. there are significant differences between britain and america. i hear what you say that there is no socialist party as there is in britain. that is true. but i am talking about

something that goes beyond party affiliation and the conventional understanding of socialism in the sense of russian communism of which is the soviet empire is a thing of the past. i am talking about a way to look at the world because the left adopted it which is a secular rest is what i was saying earlier everything is relative and a matter of opinion and therefore none of us could assert any way of life is any better than any other and as far as i can see, a lot of this has taken hold in america you may be right about the extreme right to in

america, as the fringes of the political debate and that is something we don't have in britain and i agree it is a considerable difference but looking at your democratic party from 40 years ago because they seemed to have embodied a world view of the left that everything is with a lifestyle choice with a disdain for conventional values and for the people who subscribe to the conventional values. a view of the world that is ashamed of america at the idea that it stands for values that is great and wonderful and we should try

that and also your president as well who would die and would say is pretty a left-wing character from where i am sitting that the state is basically a benevolent actor whether you agree or not is another matter but that is jerry much of left wing position i would suggest and that is something different from what you talked about as i look -- talk about a way to look at the world that has taken hold across the elites and in britain i think these attitudes that i am describing have taken hold in the conservative party the equivalent of your republican party and you are right to the situation is different but it is different that maybe you're

not quite to acknowledging. >> host: from america's social revolution, it tea nine rights it is a country divided between the super individualist culture and relativism and individual life that anything goes and also the culture of social virtue with family values and sexual morality and holding behavior to account of the war between these two cultures continues to rage in america as it does in britain from 2001 america's social revolution. we have the tweet. >> to what extent do think the pri and support of israel accounts for the antipathy the muslim-held has for them? >> guest: i think this is putting the cart before the horse. i think what lee looked at

currently is expressing to the west has to do with the fact as i was saying earlier it has been largely taken over by a particular view which seeks to hold back and turn back the tide of maternity. is tries to prevent muslims from living under the tenets of maternity. under freedom and democracy and to subject them with the submissive tenets of islam and also embodies this type of disbelief with individual freedom is important and because it is not islamic the islamist who know ruled the world i hate the west because it is not islamic

and they wished to have the dictates of islam but they hate israel, the hatred of israel is subsequent to that. israel to then is the expression of american values in particular and western modernity common values in general in the middle east so to then israel is from that point* of view and i have to say within the muslim world there is a very, very widespread hatred of jews. we don't have time to go into it but there is evidence to this that they simply hate jews in large measure. these other reasons why israel is a lightning rod for the hatred of the

western world and in addition the hatred of israel has been used to keep their own populations in the islamic world and is used as the alibi or displacement exercise that the dictators who ruled the islamic world whip up the population as a means to divert that hatred from themselves because they keep themselves in such poverty and in conditions of poverty to tyrannize them in political terms. i was interested to hear their version of america of the question of the support given to israel and britain. america survey supports israel as it should because

the bulk of american people or the ordinary god-fearing christian people understand very well israel stands up for its own values for the middle east and they identify with israel as being a nation that is founded on values identical to what america was founded on. britain doesn't have quite the same perspective it is a more troubling history. . .

>> this is the state of israel. so it is insisted with troubles and with regard. so let's put it this way, i think of it as talking out of both sides of your mouth. with one side of the mouth, one says israel is our ally. the other side of the mouth, britain's is, israel is our ally and anything militarily that it has to defend it out, we think it is wrong. that is probably the position that the british government has got itself into. the third complicated attitude is a very complicated